The SOA-BPMS Bridge To Agility.doc

The SOA-BPMS Bridge To Agility01/26/2004 By Pravin Gokhe, Integration Architect, Cognizant Technology SolutionsThe dynamic and fast-changing nature of e-business has increased pressure on enterprises to be agile and responsive. To support this business need, companies need IT infrastructures that will be driven by business value rather than technology. In an effort to achieve these goals, organizations are spending billions of dollars toward innovation, integration and automation, but are still struggling against rising complexity and cost. These inefficiencies are driven by a lack of strategies.The automation of enterprises has happened over decades by way of the best-of-breed solutions of that time. This has left different business units of enterprises stuck with different technologies, thereby creating isolated islands of automation. Most of these legacy and packaged applications were not designed to work with the other internal/external applications or Web-based applications. The rigid and non-interoperable nature of these legacy and packaged applications makes it difficult to achieve goals set by the enterprises. The enterprises cannot opt for innovation of these legacy systems to new generation technologies that support Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) due to the high cost and risk involved. Or, this may not be a viable solution at all.The growing e-business momentum has pushed businesses to leverage Internet capabilities and created a huge demand for integration within and between enterprises. The potential of todays Web-centric technologies will not be visible unless they shake hands with the existing back-end applications and processes. Going beyond enterprises, integration with partners, customers and suppliers is required to build a strong commerce chain.The strategy has been to combine the best-of-breed application components with process management and integration capabilities. But even this is not working for organizations due to proprietary models implemented by the solution vendors of business process management systems (BPMS) and integration tools. The initiative toward integrating these processes within and outside enterprises using traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) and business-to-business integration (B2Bi) tools has left organizations in a state where they havent been able to respond to changing markets quickly. This is because traditional integration solutions are technology-driven and based on proprietary models. The controls for integrating applications and processes are embedded within the integration tools, thereby creating barriers for process management systems to control and manage processes. Business people will not have real-time visibility to the processes and processes will not be easily adaptable to changing business conditions.Service-Oriented Architecture for IntegrationEnterprises need an e-business architecture that can deliver the best of both worlds - process management as well as process orchestration, connecting the IT assets to business process model. The need for agile and responsive business processes is driving basic changes in integration strategies. The integration should be driven by the business to support business dynamics. The control for integrating processes should be taken moved from the integration infrastructure to process management environments and lower-level orchestration will be the primary focus of the integration infrastructure.The SOA approach to integration can make this a reality. It means providing implementation-abstracted, standards-based interfaces to rigid and non-interoperable processes so as to facilitate interoperability. SOA helps in replacing implicit, embedded and tightly-coupled processes with those that are explicit, open and loosely coupled. Standards such as XML and Web services are going to play a key role in defining open and explicit processes. Once the processes are open and explicit, it will be easier for BPMS to integrate and manage them. SOA bridges the gap between integration infrastructure and business process management systems.As an evolution in intra-enterprise integration, the integration within an enterprise can be achieved by exposing standards-based interfaces to other business processes. XML and Web services supported by new-generation EAI tools help in generating standards-based interoperable interfaces for rigid, non-interoperable legacy and packaged applications. Integration capabilities such as transformation, translations and adapters are still required. The organizations will be able to leverage existing assets seamlessly by enabling them to participate in SOA, where they can be consumed by new or existing processes. SOA increases reusability and enables loose-coupling between processes. Sometimes, the embedded and interrelated processes that exist in legacy or packaged applications make it difficult for organizations to build a true SOA. The enterprises may have to strategically decompose these interrelated processes and recompose them using standards-based mechanisms. This will bring interrelated processes into a process management environment, where business people will be able to control them in a better manner.XML and Web services are gaining wide acceptance as a B2B collaboration protocol in the inter-enterprise integration space. EDI-based industry standards are moving toward XML. XML-based industry standards and the Internet are replacing EDI and expensive VAN. New-generation B2Bi tools are supporting emerging standards such as XML, SOAP and ebXML.To participate in the SOA space, some legacy and packaged application vendors have already started work on providing Web services support to their existing and new solutions. Human workflow provides document-centric integration aimed at collaborative human activities.Taking service-oriented approaches toward integration will have significant benefits, including:l Increasing process reuse and leverages existing assetsl Enabling loose-coupling between processes, and simplifying integrationl Enabling technology innovation without affecting the other systemsSOA adoption for the integration infrastructure will enable businesses to seamlessly integrate internal processes, partners, suppliers and human decisions in the value chain through business process management capabilities. The integration infrastructure should pass business events to process management environments to drive the integration by applying business rules. This will make it possible to move integration control from the integration infrastructure to process management environments, thus enabling integration tactics to be developed in process management environments, as per the business needs. This means integration driven by the business rather than the technology.A business-driven integration will offer benefits that could include:l Processes that become adaptable to business dynamics as process composition and decomposition is easyl Business people having real-time visibility into each and every step of the processl Process optimization as easy as the processes can be monitored and trackedBusiness Process Management SystemThe top-down and model-driven BPMS must be combined with the bottom-up integration approach seamlessly to reap the true benefits of business agility and responsiveness. SOA is going to act as the glue between the integration infrastructure and process management environment. SOA adoption will change the nature of processes by making them open, explicit and reusable, which are the key requirements for a business process management system to be effective. It will be easier for a business process management system to manage standards-based processes. The success of a business process management system is inherently linked with the evolution of processes.The capabilities of various integration solutions available in integration infrastructures are exposed to the process management environments in a standardized way, making it easy for process management products to unify these capabilities by using process integration and process automation.The capabilities of business process management systems are not new to organizations; operational efficiencies can be achieved by modeling, integrating and executing processes end-to-end. A business process management system should be used to model and automate internal processes as well as processes that span human activities and public network. Apart from process modeling and execution, the key capabilities of business process management systems include:l Business Process Integrationl Business Process Automationl Business Process Monitoring and AnalysisBusiness Process Integration (BPI) integrates processes within and outside enterprises. Business Process Automation (BPA) enables companies to automate end-to-end business processes that span internal processes, partners, suppliers and people-based processes. BPA bridges the gap between automated and manual domains by incorporating human collaborative activities in process